People of Math

Ada Countess of Lovelace Woman of Computer Science

Augusta Ada was the only child from the marriage of the flamboyant and notorious poet Lord Byron and Lady Byron, Annabella Millbanke, who separated when Ada was 1 month old, because of Lord Byron’s scandalous affair with his half sister. The Lord Byron had quite a reputation, being described by one of his lovers as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Lady Byron was noted for her intellect and had a passion for mathematics; she was called by Lord Byron “The Princess of Parallelograms.” Augusta was raised by her mother, who encouraged her intellectual talents especially in music and mathematics, to counter what Lady Byron considered dangerous poetic tendencies. At this time, women were not allowed to attend universities and could not join learned societies. Nevertheless, Augusta pursued her mathematical studies independently and with mathematicians, including William Frend. She was also encouraged by another female mathematician, Mary Somerville, and in 1834 at a dinner party hosted by Mary Somerville, she learned about Charles Babbage’s ideas for a calculating machine, called the Analytic Engine. In 1838 Augusta Ada married Lord King, later elevated to Earl of Lovelace. Together they had three children. Augusta Ada continued her mathematical studies after her marriage. Charles Babbage had continued work on his Analytic Engine and lectured on this in Europe. In 1842 Babbage asked Augusta Ada to translate an article in French describing Babbage’s invention. When Babbage saw her translation, he suggested she add her own notes, and the resulting work was three times the length of the original. The most complete accounts of the Analytic Engine are found in Augusta Ada’s notes. In her notes, she compared the working of the Analytic Engine to that of the Jacquard loom, with Babbage’s punch cards analogous to the cards used to create patterns on the loom. Furthermore, she recognized the promise of the machine as a general purpose computer much better than Babbage did. She stated that the “engine is the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity.” Her notes on the Analytic Engine anticipate many future developments, including computer-generated music. Augusta Ada published her writings under her initials A.A.L., concealing her identity as a woman as did many women at a time when women were not considered to be the intellectual equals of men. After 1845 she and Babbage worked toward the development of a system to predict horse races. Unfortunately, their system did not work well, leaving Augusta Ada heavily in debt at the time of her death at an unfortunately young age from uterine cancer. In 1953 Augusta Ada’s notes on the Analytic Engine were republished more than 100 years after they were written, and after they had been long forgotten. In his work in the 1950s on the capacity of computers to think (and his influential Turing test for determining whether a machine is intelligent), Alan Turing responded to Augusta Ada’s statement that “The Analytic Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.” This “dialogue” between Turing and Augusta Ada is still the subject of controversy. Because of her fundamental contributions to computing, the programming language Ada is named in honor of the Countess of Lovelace.

Georg Cantor Set Theory

GEORG CANTOR (1845–1918) Georg Cantor was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, where his father was a successful merchant. Cantor developed his interest in mathematics in his teens. He began his university studies in Zurich in 1862, but when his father died he left Zurich. He continued his university studies at the University of Berlin in 1863, where he studied under the eminent mathematicians Weierstrass, Kummer, and Kronecker. He received his doctor’s degree in 1867, after having written a dissertation on number theory. Cantor assumed a position at the University of Halle in 1869, where he continued working until his death. Cantor is considered the founder of set theory. His contributions in this area include the discovery that the set of real numbers is uncountable. He is also noted for his many important contributions to analysis also was interested in philosophy and wrote papers relating his theory of sets with metaphysics. Cantor married in 1874 and had six children. His melancholy temperament was balanced by his wife’s happy disposition. Although he received a large inheritance from his father, he was poorly paid as a professor. To mitigate this, he tried to obtain a better-paying position at the University of Berlin. His appointment there was blocked by Kronecker, who did not agree with Cantor’s views on set theory. Cantor suffered from mental illness throughout the later years of his life. He died in 1918 from a heart attack.

Betrand Russel author of Principia Mathematica

BERTRAND RUSSELL (1872–1970) Bertrand Russell was born into a prominent English family active in
the progressive movement and having a strong commitment to liberty. He became an orphan at an early age
and was placed in the care of his father’s parents, who had him educated at home. He entered Trinity College,
Cambridge, in 1890, where he excelled in mathematics and in moral science. He won a fellowship on the basis
of his work on the foundations of geometry. In 1910 Trinity College appointed him to a lectureship in logic and
the philosophy of mathematics.
Russell fought for progressive causes throughout his life. He held strong pacifist views, and his protests
against World War I led to dismissal from his position at Trinity College. He was imprisoned for 6 months in
1918 because of an article he wrote that was branded as seditious. Russell fought for women’s suffrage in Great
Britain. In 1961, at the age of 89, he was imprisoned for the second time for his protests advocating nuclear
disarmament.
Russell’s greatest work was in his development of principles that could be used as a foundation for all
of mathematics. His most famous work is Principia Mathematica, written with Alfred North Whitehead,
which attempts to deduce all of mathematics using a set of primitive axioms. He wrote many books on philosophy, physics, and his
political ideas. Russell won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.

John Venn Venn Diagrams

JOHN VENN (1834–1923) John Venn was born into a London suburban family noted for its philanthropy.
He attended London schools and got his mathematics degree from Caius College, Cambridge, in 1857. He was
elected a fellow of this college and held his fellowship there until his death. He took holy orders in 1859 and,
after a brief stint of religious work, returned to Cambridge, where he developed programs in the moral sciences.
Besides his mathematical work, Venn had an interest in history and wrote extensively about his college and
family.
Venn’s book Symbolic Logic clarifies ideas originally presented by Boole. In this book, Venn presents a
systematic development of a method that uses geometric figures, known now as Venn diagrams. Today these
diagrams are primarily used to analyze logical arguments and to illustrate relationships between sets. In addition
to his work on symbolic logic, Venn made contributions to probability theory described in his widely used
textbook on that subject.

René Descartes Cartesian Geometry

RENÉ DESCARTES (1596–1650) René Descartes was born into a noble family near Tours, France, about 130 miles southwest of Paris. He was the third child of his father’s first wife; she died several days after his birth. Because of René’s poor health, his father, a provincial judge, let his son’s formal lessons slide until, at the age of 8, René entered the Jesuit college at La Flèche. The rector of the school took a liking to him and permitted him to stay in bed until late in the morning because of his frail health. From then on, Descartes spent his mornings in bed; he considered these times his most productive hours for thinking. Descartes left school in 1612, moving to Paris, where he spent 2 years studying mathematics. He earned a law degree in 1616 from the University of Poitiers. At 18 Descartes became disgusted with studying and decided to see the world. He moved to Paris and became a successful gambler. However, he grew tired of bawdy living and moved to the suburb of Saint-Germain, where he devoted himself to mathematical study. When his gambling friends found him, he decided to leave France and undertake a military career. However, he never did any fighting. One day, while escaping the cold in an overheated room at a military encampment, he had several feverish dreams, which revealed his future career as a mathematician and philosopher. After ending his military career, he traveled throughout Europe. He then spent several years in Paris, where he studied mathematics and philosophy and constructed optical instruments. Descartes decided to move to Holland, where he spent 20 years wandering around the country, accomplishing his most important work. During this time he wrote several books, including the Discourse, which contains his contributions to analytic geometry, for which he is best known. He also made fundamental contributions to philosophy. In 1649 Descartes was invited by Queen Christina to visit her court in Sweden to tutor her in philosophy. Although he was reluctant to live in what he called “the land of bears amongst rocks and ice,” he finally accepted the invitation and moved to Sweden. Unfortunately, the winter of 1649–1650 was extremely bitter. Descartes caught pneumonia and died in mid-February.